Claymation Whiz Recreates The Thing With Cats Following Pingu Takedown

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Claymation Whiz Recreates The Thing With Cats Following Pingu Takedown

Clay-animation artist Lee Hardcastle was crushed earlier this year when his viral video, in which the happy penguin of Pingu experience the horrors of John Carpenter's The Thing, got yanked from YouTube. But Hardcastle recharged himself by making a shot-for-shot re-creation of his banned "Pingu's The Thing" – with cats.

It took Hardcastle just over two weeks to make "Claycat's The Thing" (above), since he'd smartly saved many of the sets and props used for his Pingu version. At one point he considered simply making a generic penguin version of Carpenter's classic horror film, but he opted to create his own Claycats characters for the stop-motion video.

"I took the model of Pingu and wanted to make a Cat version of him because the cat is the internet mascot after all," Hardcastle said in an e-mail to Wired. "I would have liked to have done my own version of claymation penguins but I received legal advice that it was gonna be tricky if I was to do anything with clay, penguins and blood."

Hardcastle even went the extra mile and created a 3-D version of the video using a $1,700 contraption called a "slider" that – instead of using two cameras – takes one image for the right eye and then moves a few centimeters over and takes another, so a stereoscopic image can be made. (Watch the stereoscopic version below if you happen to be near a pair of 3-D glasses.)

Hit Entertainment, the rights-holder for Swiss stop-motion TV show Pingu, requested that the video be taken down in February.

"It is our responsibility to uphold the integrity of the brand and ensure its representation is safe and entertaining for children as it was originally created," the company told Wired in an e-mail. "We reserve the right to have content removed that we believe does not meet this standard."

>"It was my 'Keyboard Cat.'"

Hardcastle now says he feels the action the company took was fair, but that he was "absolutely gutted" when the video was removed.

"It was my first stellar viral video, it was the video I was gonna be remembered for – it was my 'Keyboard Cat,' my 'Charlie bit my finger,'" Hardcastle said. "Once it was taken down.... That was it, game over! My excitement was squashed just like that."

To his credit, Hardcastle's latest effort is pretty stellar itself, and the artist has more planned. He envisions "Claycat Cinema" versions of The Fly, Taxi Driver and Evil Dead II down the line.